In 1956, Jack Kerouac spent two months as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak, in northern Washington, a job he got with the help of his friend, the poet Gary Snyder. Kerouac had published one novel, The Town and the City, but was broke and uncertain if his new novel On The Road would interest publishers. He needed the money, but also liked the idea of getting away from city life and alcohol. The experience later factored into two books, his second-most famous, The Dharma Bums, and the first section of the less successful-but-still-interesting Desolation Angels.
Editor Charles Shuttleworth has collected in Desolation Peak: Collected Writings all the writing Kerouac did in those two months up in a shack on a mountain, including a daily journal, the start of two unfruitful novels, numerous haikus, the longer 12-part poem “Desolation Blues” and Kerouac’s reworking/rewriting of the famous Buddhist text, The Diamond Sutra, which he wanted to make more accessible to non-academics. The only texts not included are some letters he wrote to friends and his mom, and that first section from Desolation Angels (the best part of that book).
Shuttleworth’s thesis is a push-back against what all of Kerouac’s biographers have written about his time as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak: that it was inconsequential and/or bad for his mental health and/or that it marked the decline of this writing (the last of which is crazy, since while he already had written On The Road, he had yet to write The Dharma Bums). Instead Shuttleworth proposes that Kerouac’s time on Desolation was a key moment, both for his life, and his writing, and that Kerouac was at the height of his writing powers then. As a side note he proposes that it was the publishing of On The Road the next year which started Kerouac’s decline, because he suddenly was famous and had enough money to buy all the alcohol he wanted. Also that he was able to buy a house, which basically stopped his travels, which even Kerouac in this book says is the source of his inspiration: “I better start living adventurously again so I’ll have something to write about—”
The journal Kerouac kept up on Desolation takes up about 80 pages here (plus pages of end notes by Shuttleworth). Keep in mind that he was scribbling this in one of those small hand-held pocket journals. And he was writing his other “projects” on two other larger notebooks, and he filled those up on scrap government forms. Shuttleworth assembles each page of the pocket notebook as a separate section (sometimes a block of text, sometimes a couple of paragraphs, with the page number from the notebook heading each section.)
Page 63
...wrote, cleaned woodshed, labeled cans—a bright windy day in the mountains with snow sparkling everywhere but the lake a mile below is like a mirror—The Alpine firs are jiggling Christmas trees on top of the world—Lonesome complicated puff-eyed clouds float on by—Creek valley s are hazy blue—The working wind cannot obliterate the Silence of the Emptiness... Feeling, now, happier than in years—is it Solitude or the absence of liquor?...
Page 64
At red dusk, now, the mountains are covered with pink snow, the clouds are distant and frilly and like ancient remote cities of Buddhaland Splendour—The wind works incessantly, whish, whish, booming at times, rattling my ship—The new moon is prognathic & secretly funny over the monstrous shoulders of haze that rise from that valley lake—sharp jags pop up from behind slopes, like childhood mountains... Paced in red dusk, singing loud & happy.
Shuttleworth shows his strength, and care, as an editor when he includes excerpts from The Dharma Bums next to haikus Kerouac wrote in his notebooks, showing how Kerouac just adapted the haikus, (which Shuttleworth has numbered) into prose sentences. For example, these three haikus in a row:
(62)
Mists blew by, I
closed my eyes,—
Stove did the talking
(63)
“Woo!”—bird of perfect
balance on the fir
just moved his tail
(64)
Bird was gone
and distance grew
Immensely white
become this paragraph from chapter 33 of The Dharma Bums:
Mists blew by, I closed my eyes, the stove did the talking. “Woo!” I yelled, and the bird of perfect balance on the first point just moved his tail; then he was gone and distance grew immensely white.
These and others parts of Desolation Peak show Kerouac’s writing process as it was happening. Notably, they also show just how much Kerouac’s writing didn’t need that much revision.
Less interesting are the two novels Kerouac starts but abandons, Ozone Park and a possible sequel to his first novel, The Town and the City, which is just called The Martin Family. Or, they’re interesting, as a look into what, and how, Kerouac was thinking in this time. They read more like The Town and the City, and we read in the journals that Kerouac intentionally was going for a “Deliberative Prose” versus the “Spontaneous Prose” that he was more known for.
They’re about family life, and I don’t think that’s where Kerouac’s writing energy really sparked. They read as novels Kerouac thought he should write, as a responsible writer, even though he’d just written On The Road the year (or two) before. But, despite the fact that an excerpt of On The Road was selected for the Best American Short Stories that summer, he still wasn’t sure the novel should be published, or liked. He switched to writing about the experience that was going on with him, right then, which would become the start of Desolation Angels.
The best section of Desolation Peak is the inclusion of Kerouac’s “Desolation Blues” series of poems, which were originally included in the Book of Blues (also the best part of that book). This is the best poetry he wrote, and were a huge influence on me, as a writer who also happens to be a lookout. I don’t know if Kerouac knew about the structure of a typical blues song, but most blues is based around a repeating chord progression called a 12 Bar Blues: 12 measures which repeat. But Kerouac’s “Desolation Blues” contains 12 numbered “choruses,” each of which stand on their own, but collectively build to a larger sense for life on Desolation, including Kerouac’s highs and especially the lows, his blues.
Shuttleworth includes at the end of Desolation Peak some photographs of notebooks, covers and pages, including some of the government forms he wrote on the back of, and his application for the job. There are some funny sketches, and close-ups of his excellent handwriting, especially considering he was scribbling on top of a mountain.
Desolation Peak may not be the book for the Kerouac-curious to start with, though I’d argue those curious about his poetry start with “Desolation Blues” either in this book or in The Book of Blues. But for diehard Kerouac fans, this book is a gift of a little more of his writing: his energetic style, which is what I think all us fans love the most about him (versus, say, great plots) is mostly all there in the journal section. This is the time of life when Kerouac was heavily into Buddhism, so there are many references, à la The Dharma Bums, which may put off some, and his re-writing of The Diamond Sutra—a text I like and which is a key Buddhist text—is okay: you can find better versions. Still, it’s interesting to see how obsessed with the text he was at that time, and how it led to The Dharma Bums, which caused a great surge in interest in Buddhism in the United States.